i am sleeping on a time bomb
by i forgot to blink
Summary: The war is over, and they go to Antarctica.


**Notes and Disclaimer**

This was written for a friend who requested a postwar DracoxHermione fic as a graduation gift. Title and italicized chapter breaks were ganked from Vertical Horizon and The Weepies, respectively. Ignores the seventh book's epilogue and basically ships everyone with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Beware suicide, profanity and angst. My friend wanted a happy ending and I tried my hardest to get it there, but God knows I can't write happiness to save my life, so your mileage may vary. Reviews would be very much appreciated.

On to the fic!

**i am sleeping on a time bomb**

_i lose my breath despite the air_

Ron Weasley kills himself on Sunday morning.

He takes his broomstick out to the hill overlooking Ottery St. Catchpole. Three townspeople see him dive face-first into the earth, cracking his skull on the rocks below. Two of the witnesses are Muggles and summarily Obliviated.

Harry Potter cannot be reached for comment, nor does he respond to the barrage of condolences sent via owl post.

Ginny Weasley hexes the first reporter who asks her for an interview.

By late afternoon, the _Daily Prophet_ has released a five-page spread containing, among other things, an official statement from the Minister of Magic and a brief biography detailing Ron's childhood, his time at Hogwarts, his role in defeating Voldemort, his Order of Merlin, his career with the Chudley Cannons- all the bits and pieces of his life, from his birth to that final, fatal plunge.

_A Wronski Feint, _the more sensational tabloids proclaim, _Gone Terribly WRONG!_

Draco Malfoy's journal entry for that day reads, in sardonic cursive, _War is seldom kind to its heroes._

A week and a lifetime after the funeral, Hermione Granger goes back to work.

_all it takes is a little faith and a lot of heart_

_sweetheart_

Heads turn as she strides into the Department of Mysteries. Not pausing to acknowledge the tentative greetings or the pitying looks from her colleagues, she walks straight to the office she shares with Malfoy and slams the door shut behind her, leaving a trail of whispers in her wake.

Malfoy's at his desk, perusing a heap of documents with the same casual elegance that had belied the lofty marks he'd gotten at school. It's such an outstandingly normal scene that Hermione's brought up short, but only for a fleeting moment. His gray eyes flicker up to her in surprise as she slides into her own chair across the room.

He clears his throat. "Granger."

"Malfoy," she replies in clipped tones as her quill scratches brisk signatures across the paperwork that had accumulated during all the days she'd been gone. "I assume that in the course of my absence you've taken care of any last-minute departmental procedures pertaining to our Antarctica mission."

"You're still going?" The words slip from him, incredulous.

She raises an eyebrow. "Naturally. I can hardly expect you to carry out the investigation all by yourself."

"I'm sure the Ministry will gladly assign someone else to-"

"Shut it," she snaps.

He stares at her. She wonders what he must be seeing now: the collarbones jutting out of her robes, the translucent skin, the purple bruises under eyes dry and raw.

Finally he shrugs. "Whatever you say, Granger."

_antarctica, my only living relative_

_antarctica, i can't wait anymore_

The afternoon before she leaves, Harry Apparates into her flat. "Chocolate chip muffins from Molly," he announces, holding out a brown package.

Hermione takes it from him, refusing to think about the love and the despair that Molly Weasley must have baked into the very dough itself, the domestic fervor of a woman who has lost two sons in the span of four years. "I'll drop by the Burrow first thing when I come back."

Harry helps her pack in silence. They tie ropes around the boxes containing her books and her tools. But his knots are slack and clumsy, and when they unravel for the ninth time, Hermione sighs in exasperation. "A Boy Scout, you are most definitely not."

The corner of his mouth tilts in a small and rueful grin, and it's suddenly unfair, because it should be the two of them here today, her two boys, helping her pack and botching the job, with Ron complaining about how she'll be stuck in a frozen wasteland for months with Draco _sodding _Malfoy-

"Harry."

"Yeah?"

She wants to ask him what it had been like to die. Maybe he can give the words that will finally make her understand. The question, however, withers in her throat, because the war is over and she's still not brave enough. She settles for, "Will you be all right?" _Will I?_

Harry's green eyes soften. He still jumps at abrupt loud noises, turning with wand raised and offensive spells on his tongue while Ron instinctively swerves to block her from any would-be attacker's line of fire. _Swerved. _Past tense.

"I'll miss you," Harry says. He opens his arms and Hermione stumbles into them, and they hold each other by the light of a fading sun as the ghosts creep in.

_we all fall down_

The artifact had been discovered by a team of British explorers. One was a witch who vaguely recognized some of the runes from her time at Hogwarts and promptly alerted the Ministry. After the necessary Obliviations had been performed, a base was set up at the location, rendered Unplottable and draped with Anti-Apparition wards and Concealment Charms to shield it from the prying eyes of the Chinese and Russian intelligence networks.

Unfortunately, Hermione and Malfoy's Portkey is configured to a thin spot on the ice which breaks off from the main mass when they appear. They watch the shore helplessly, drifting away.

"Brilliant," Malfoy drawls. "I suppose you don't know how to fly, Granger?"

"No," says Hermione, crouching down, "but the ice can. _Wingardium Leviosa!"_

A jolt brings Malfoy to his knees. He grips the edges of the floe they're on as it rises creakily into the air and then, with a snap of Hermione's wrist, soars over the black water. They brace themselves for impact, rolling away when the floe shatters against steadier ground.

"You could have warned me," Malfoy grumbles, standing up and brushing snow from his robes. "But nice trick."

"Far from perfect. You didn't fall off," Hermione observes, earning a smirk from him.

"I haven't used that spell since Hogwarts," he remarks as they make their way to the base.

"Some things you never forget," she tells him, carefully turning her face away so he won't catch her expression.

_It's Levi-_o_-sa, not Levio-_sa.

_but to never regret means that you have to forget_

_and i don't think that i could_

Antarctica is howling wind and blazing whiteness and, oh, how it draws her in. She thinks she can easily lose herself here, at the very edge of the world, where towers of ice meet a paper sky. She can bury deep into the snow and sleep forever, or let the katabatic gusts eat at her skin and her bones until there's nothing left.

But what she's doing right now is this: studying the artifact. It's a rectangular slab of roughly hewn black obsidian, about two meters tall, breaking the pristine and sloping symmetry of the landscape. Its surface is engraved with runes, most of them familiar to her but arranged in what is at first glance a senseless jumble.

Malfoy's fingers reach out to lightly graze the stone, then jerk as if they'd been burned. "No wonder the Ministry's so determined to keep this thing under wraps. It's practically sizzling with magic."

"Dark?" Hermione asks.

The smile he gives her is lopsided and strange. He looks more real here, sharper, somehow, his hair a pale beacon and his eyes like flints.

"All magic can be dark," he says.

_even the stars sometimes fade to gray_

_even the stars hide away_

It's late summer in Antarctica, so the land is frozen in perpetual daylight. A semblance of normalcy is required; a schedule is set to New Zealand hours, the accepted clock in a place where all time zones converge.

In the mornings, Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger trudge out of the tent, armed in coats and scarves and Warming Spells. They stare at the runes for hours, trying to work out patterns, arguing over the meaning of a particular symbol, squinting at the arcane inscriptions until they get headaches and break for lunch.

In the afternoons, they run various diagnostics on the stone, attempting to determine its origins and exact nature as it hums and glows under the paths their wands trace. They compare notes and consult textbooks over tea.

During the nights, more often than not, they have bad dreams.

Hermione dreams of knives and forests and dragon wings. She wakes up with gasps, with her lips forming the names of those long dead.

Draco's dreams are filled with cold laughter and lightning and fire. He wakes up screaming.

On some nights, they wake up at the same time.

_we'll weave our days together like waves_

_and particles of light_

"Perhaps we should talk." Malfoy's voice is a cool murmur in the darkness of the tent.

"About what?"

"Anything. Until we fall asleep again."

Lying flat on her back, Hermione stares at a roof she cannot see. "I visited Crabbe's grave once."

His breath hitches. "Why?"

"I knew him. I went to school with him. We could have been friends, if things had been different."

He laughs. It's a harsh sound, mocking and unpleasant. "You're daft. He tried to kill you."

"That doesn't mean I can't remember him." She remembers Crabbe because memory is her curse, because surviving the war means dealing with the fact that you survived it. Does she really need to tell him that? Doesn't he already know? "He was the only Slytherin in our year who died. It's almost funny."

"You have a shitty sense of humor."

Unexpectedly, she finds herself almost smiling at this, at hearing one of the earthier expletives couched in that haughty and aristocratic drawl. "The night at the manor, four years ago- why didn't you tell your family it was us? They would have called Voldemort sooner."

He's silent for a while. Outside, the wind picks up, battering the sides of the tent, and into its roar he says, "Maybe you just answered your own question."

_i walk away_

_but you linger_

It becomes a routine, sort of. When the nightmares rouse them, they talk until it wears them out and the sound of each other's voice lulls them back to sleep. It's the kind of thing Hermione does with Harry, what she used to do with Ron, back in England, and it's surreal how Malfoy's filled up the space on this vast continent of snow and ice.

"I used to fancy you sometimes," she says, yawning. "When we were still at Hogwarts."

"Only sometimes?" he jokes, but with a definite hint of interest.

"There were days when you could be very beautiful. But then you'd open your fat mouth and I'd hate you again."

"A typical school girl's crush, then."

She nods, only belatedly realizing he can't see her in the darkness from a bed on the other side of the tent. "It was, wasn't it? It came and it went. And _you_ came back nastier each time around, until you were… a caricature of yourself."

"A caricature." He sounds slightly put off, like he doesn't much care for the turn the conversation has taken.

"A boy made of paper. Thinner at the edges. I could almost see right through you. It was like you were fading away as the days passed."

"Maybe I was."

"Yes." She stifles another yawn. "By the end of sixth year, you were gone."

_these moments go so fast_

_let them go_

And one night she dreams of Ron.

Not Ron as she saw him last, pale and cold and still in a wooden box, but Ron smiling at her and talking through a mouthful of pancakes, Ron waving to her from the air during a practice game and getting concussed by a Bludger as a result. In this dream, he is strong and warm beside her, smelling like fresh-cut grass. In this dream he is alive, and that is how she knows she is dreaming.

She pushes herself to a sitting position and checks for tears, but her cheeks are dry. She hears Malfoy stir.

"All right, Granger?"

She can tell from his alert tone that he's been awake for a while, probably waiting for her. "I'm fine," she croaks.

"What did you dream about?"

It startles her, because in all the weeks of late-night talks neither of them has dared ask this question before. She hesitates, sensing the importance of this moment and how it can change everything, but finally she settles back into her bed, pulling the blanket tight around her, because the war is over and there are things she can and cannot keep.

"You can't have my dreams," she tells Malfoy. "I already gave you everything else."

_i thought of you and where you'd gone_

_and the world spins madly on_

The weeks bleed into months and the months bleed into winter and night falls over the Antarctic Circle in silver veils.

Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy have finally surmised via diagnostic spells that the artifact is Druidic, with Hermione making a persuasive case for the Celts sailing to Europe from Gaul, as supported in various texts on the history of wizarding exploration, but the runes continue to stump them.

Due to the Ministry's insistence on top-level secrecy, they have no contact with the outside world. Months of isolation and slow progress take their toll, and tempers rise as the temperature continues to drop. They snap at each other over petty things and take their meals in silence.

The nightmares get worse, but the late-night talks pewter out and Hermione is certain she can't sleep anymore.

On the other hand, the cold turns Draco's blood sluggish, and he dozes in heavy, fitful bursts, to the point that Hermione has to drag him out of bed almost every morning, which only serves to increase the tension between them.

And then one day, Hermione looks over Draco's shoulder and scoffs at his notes, pointing out an inaccuracy in the rune progression he's attempting to follow through. Before they know it, they're screaming at each other in that cramped little tent, hurling insults so childish it could almost be Hogwarts again.

"We'd have gotten a lot further by now if you hadn't spent all this time _sleeping!" _Hermione rails. "Is laziness a valued Death Eater asset? And I wondered why your side lost the war!"

She's brought up the unforgivable, she's made Draco compulsively draw back the forearm branded with a remnant from the past that can never be erased.

"What's the war got to do with this, Granger?" he shouts. "Reliving your glory days, are you? Feeling sorry for yourself because that's the only time a Mudblood like you has ever _mattered?"_

With each word, old sins are being brought back to life, bearing with them all the old ugliness, all the worst of each other that chafes at their nerves.

Hermione narrows her eyes. "You are a stubborn, arrogant git, Malfoy, and I regret having ever met you! At least Ron-" The instant she says the name, she breaks off, clapping both hands over her mouth.

Spurred by anger and frustration, Draco takes a step forward, a muscle ticking along his jaw. "Weasley's _dead, _Granger!" he yells in her face. "He's dead, and _you _are a waspish, insufferable bint, and he offed himself because he couldn't stomach the thought of spending the rest of his life with a know-it-all shrew like you!"

They are both frozen. The sentences hang in the air like icicles.

A look of panic flashes over Draco's features. "Wait, I didn't mean that. I-"

Hermione walks out of the tent.

_i remember what you told me_

_only wish i could forget_

She sits in the snow, watching the Aurora Australis shift and spiral above her, lighting up the star-strewn sky with plumes of red and violet and green and gold. She hears Malfoy's soft footsteps before she sees him.

"You haven't changed a bit, you know." How bitter she sounds to her own ears. How tired. "You're still a bully. Using people's weaknesses against them. Hitting where it hurts the most."

"You do that, too." His tone is solemn, devoid of rancor.

"I suppose."

He sits beside her. The lights in the sky gleam off his pale skin and his blond hair, casting shadows, sharpening his high cheekbones into scimitars, turning his eyes silver. He looks frighteningly young and ethereal, like one of her ghosts. Her chest aches.

"Harry and I have trouble sleeping," she says, perhaps to Malfoy, perhaps to the snow. "But Ron couldn't sleep at all. It took three potions to knock him out, and only for a short while. His hands shook all the time. He couldn't even look at George or talk to him for too long. Quidditch was a distraction, and that helped for a bit, until his moods started getting more erratic. He'd be laughing one minute, furious the next. I began wearing long sleeves because every time he saw the scars Bellatrix gave me, he'd shut down."

Malfoy sighs. "I really don't want to hear this, Granger. What's the point?"

"I want to say it," she retorts. "So you can listen, or you can leave."

He doesn't move. She takes a deep breath, then continues. "I didn't cry when Harry told me Ron was dead, or at the funeral. I haven't cried for him at all. And now I'm here in Antarctica, freezing my arse off, working on a project that's going nowhere. And I'm with you. Draco Malfoy, of all people. What a joke." She chuckles, the sound falling flat against the ice. "What a mess. What an absolute _shithole _of a world. Maybe Ron had the right idea leaving it."

She closes her eyes. The glow from the Southern Lights trembles on the folds of her shut lids. "I'm too much of a coward for that, though."

A cool hand reaches out, as if to grab hold of hers, but stops at the last moment, skimming over her knuckles instead. "That's bollocks." Malfoy's voice is tight and edged. "What he did was stupid. It wasn't brave."

"And what," she whispers, "would _you _know of bravery?"

When he doesn't respond, she opens her eyes. He's staring up at the heavens as the wind treads snowflakes through his hair.

"I broke off the engagement."

His gaze whips to hers, shocked. "When?"

"When do you think?" she asks wryly, because the war is over and she has lost all her grace. "After you and I fucked."

_i walk the line between now and then_

Two months before Ron Weasley killed himself, Hermione Granger had sex with Draco Malfoy.

It wasn't planned. It wasn't anything. It was the day of the third anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts, and fireworks were going off all over wizarding Britain. Newspaper headlines rejoiced and Ministry officials gave important speeches and people hugged each other on the streets.

Harry Potter and the Weasley family had a quiet dinner at the Burrow. Every once in a while, one of them would sneak a glance at the clock where Fred's hand was, always and forever, pointed to _Home._

Neville Longbottom, Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnigan spent the whole afternoon at a Muggle pub. They got into a brawl and were thrown out, drunk and bleeding. Neville retched booze and half-digested chips onto the sidewalk while Dean and Seamus laughed through the cuts on their lips until they cried.

Dennis Creevey went to his brother's grave and stayed there until nightfall.

Draco and Hermione bought chose to work overtime, holing themselves up in their office and writing reports and making desultory small talk.

A loud bang shook the windows and they dove for cover behind their desks, realizing a split second too late that it was only the fireworks outside.

They slowly got to their feet, embarrassed. All the color had drained from Hermione's face. Draco's hands were shaking.

She thought about what was back home, Ron's silences and Harry absent-mindedly touching a scar that had ceased to throb. He thought about his father waiting for absolution in the shadows of Azkaban and the look on Crabbe's face when he let go.

Maybe he kissed her first. Maybe they moved at the same time. Maybe the war was over. Maybe it would never end.

_oh, look what i've become_

Hermione examines the runes by wandlight. She's stared at them so much that they float before her every time she closes her eyes. Once more, as she does every day, she runs through patterns in her head, maps them out on parchment, but they continue to defy her. She's at the end of her rope. She hasn't seen the sun in months.

"It's gibberish," she says to Malfoy in disgust, taking a step back from the artifact. "The Druids must have liked a practical joke as much as anyone else."

"Should we return to England?" he asks. He looks just as fed up as she is, jittery and sick from the days of never-ending Antarctic darkness. All they have to do is activate the encrypted Portkey waiting at the tent, and they'll be in their office at the Ministry of Magic again.

She doesn't like admitting defeat, but she's also smart enough to know that she'll go mad if she stays in this place much longer. "Let's leave tomorrow." She tilts her head back, breathes in the cold air, stares at the angle of the artifact outlined against a blue-black sky wreathed with stars.

And that's when she sees it, clicking into place like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, slicing into her mind like a burst of brilliant white light, a solar flare.

"Malfoy!"

_and i know how dark you get_

_late in the night_

The Druids had plucked down the heavens, carving the stars into the stone; their runes depicted the Southern Hemisphere, the message hidden in arrangements that represented the constellations.

With the aid of star charts and Arithmancy formulas, Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger crack the code overnight. As the sky wavers into the lighter, lesser darkness that in this part of the world is called morning, they successfully manage to isolate the entire contents of the message from the filler text.

Hermione's all for doing the translation straight away, but one look at her haggard face and Draco insists they get some sleep.

When they wake up, it is night again.

They rush outside, already jubilant at the fact that the end is within sight. They work on the translation ceaselessly under the jeweled glow of the Aurora Australis, framing old words into the cradle of newer tongues.

_and, oh, when the lights are low_

_oh, with someone i don't know_

"I've got it." Malfoy slowly lowers his notes. "It's done."

Part of Hermione is annoyed that he beat her to finishing the translation, but she's also curious and blessedly relieved. "Well, what is it?"

Does she imagine it, the way he hesitates before speaking, the way his shoulders tense?

"It's a chapter from the Book of the Dead," he says at last. "It's a ritual for bringing the dead back to life."

The first thought that enters Hermione's mind is how she can use that to bring Ron back. The second thought is why she never will.

No matter how screwed up you are, no matter how much you miss someone that your whole body hurts from it, there are still some lines that cannot be crossed because that would mean forgetting what you gave up your childhood for. The war is over, and he is gone.

Here, at the edge of the world, where the cold burns everything through, where the Southern Lights tint the landscape in frosty colors, Hermione falls to her knees amidst the ice, and finally, _finally _cries, for the first time since Ron died, for the first time in years.

_but i'm the one who's waiting_

'_til the sun comes out again_

After Antarctica, England is impossibly warm, the air muggy and thick, the day too bright. Hermione finds herself almost longing for the black ocean and the bone-white snows, for the solitude that came with the roar of the katabatics. She spent seven months there that had felt like a lifetime, but now it's all only a distant memory, buried underneath office paperwork and daily routine.

"Granger."

The sound of Malfoy's voice stops her hand on the doorknob. "Yes?"

He pauses, as if carefully weighing his next words. They come out strangled. "Would you care to join me for lunch?"

She doesn't need to turn around and look at him to know that he'll be sporting that strange expression on his face, oblique yet somehow still vulnerable, the same one he had worn on that long-ago night, when he tangled those slender fingers into her hair, when the only sounds in the room were the crackling embers in the fireplace and their unsteady breaths.

"No," she says, and walks out of the office.

_starlight, won't you kiss me_

_for i have missed you so_

She Apparates into Harry's flat, feels his wards shifting aside as they recognize her. They watch television on his couch, their shoulders touching in an awkward way that still cries out for the gap that Ron had once filled, but she can't process the tinny voices and the flickering images on the screen.

"Why did he do it?" she asks.

Into the ensuing silence, the past pours into the room, all the old recriminations, all the old pain. _You should have stopped him- I didn't know- You should have talked to him, he would have listened- No, he wouldn't have- It should be the three of us, it should _always _be the three of us-_

"Does it really matter?" Harry sighs. "I've been thinking- sometimes life is shit, yeah? Sometimes something happens, and things won't ever be the same after that. It's about- it's about rolling with the punches, and that can be exhausting, and it's no way to live, and that can be hard to accept."

"So what's your point, Harry? Ron got tired of getting hit and didn't want to get up again?"

He clicks off the telly, and the look in his eyes makes her feel ashamed. It's been so easy all this time to forget that she's not the only one who's lost everything.

"It wasn't you, Hermione," he quietly says, a boy, a man still trying to save the world. "What he did- it wasn't really escape. Not quite. People find a way to surprise you, no matter how long you've known them. For good or bad, people always surprise you. We all have our own ways of finding grace."

She nods. The question wells up inside her, like one of those sudden Antarctic blizzards, but this time she doesn't turn her face away.

"Harry, what was it like to die?"

And softly, unexpectedly, the Boy Who Lived smiles. "Over-rated."

_you said in my photograph i looked more far away_

_i laughed and smiled and didn't say,_

"_i am a bit afraid to be here"_

Malfoy scrupulously avoids talking to her the next day at work. She spends the morning writing reports at her desk, but when the clock in their office chimes noon, she looks up at him.

"Malfoy?"

"What is it?" he mutters. He's still scribbling furiously on parchment, but his eyebrows draw together warily. The sun's rays stream in through the windows, catching his hair, his pale skin. She thinks about Antarctica, the slope of his nose covered in snowflakes, his voice in the darkness, the way he held her when she cried, saying nothing as his hand stroked her back, the angles of his face gleaming in the wandlight.

Hermione Granger takes a deep breath, for courage. "Lunch?"

_and that is how you survived the war_

**end**


End file.
